August 11/17 9:10 am - Cote Adds Another Gold Medal for Quebec in Men's Road Race
Posted by Editoress on 08/11/17
Quebec chalked up another win at the Canada Summer Games on Thursday, with Pier-Andre Cote winning the men's road race, the third gold medal for Quebec in four road events.
The nine lap, 125 kilometre race around Birds Hill Provincial Park saw a group of the top contenders split the field early in the race. Efforts to further breakaway from this group proved to be unsuccessful for most of the race until six riders went clear with less than 40 kilometres remaining in the race.
The final front group contained two riders from Quebec (Cote, Marc-Antoine Soucy), and one each from Alberta (Connor Topping), British Columbia (Jay Lamoureux), host Manitoba (Willem Boersma) and Ontario (Trevor O'Donnell). In the final kilometre, Cote and Toppings got a gap, with Cote rolling across the line three seconds in front of Topping. Lamoureux took the bronze for B.C.
"We wanted to make the race hard," explained Cote, who won the silver medal in the time trial on Tuesday. "We had a strong team of five riders, but it was hard to break away because the course was flat and pretty easy. The only problem could have been the wind, but it wasn't too much of a factor. So, we had to make the race hard, and it paid off. I was the sprinter [for the team], and that was the card we had to play today."
Quebec team manager Pascal Choquette said, "We had a good result, the outcome is what we expected. On an easy course like this it is hard to manage the race and isolate the other teams. In the final breakaway of six we were the only team with two riders, so we knew it was a good move for us."
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